Conservative strategist Weyrich dies at 66
WASHINGTON -- Conservatives are mourning the loss of Paul Weyrich, a savvy tactician and big thinker who drove the revival of the Republican Party after Watergate and was working on a blueprint for "the next conservatism" when he died early Thursday at 66.
"He was on the frontlines for a very long time. We're really going to miss him," said Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner, who knew Weyrich for 41 years.
John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, called Weyrich a pillar of the conservative movement and one of its chief strategists "to his dying day."
Weyrich was CEO and chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, which focused on cultural issues. He had long battled diabetes and used a wheelchair after his legs were amputated.
"The health problems Paul confronted in the last few years would have stopped most men, but not him," David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said in a statement. "He could be ornery, but he accomplished more than almost anyone of his generation."
Weyrich and Feulner co-founded Heritage, a conservative think tank, and Weyrich was its first president.
He recruited Jerry Falwell to start the Moral Majority. He also founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, which recruited and trained candidates; it later became Weyrich's foundation.
Beyond institutions, Weyrich knit together the coalition that served the GOP so well until recently: fiscal conservatives, national security hawks and cultural conservatives. He pretty much discovered and mobilized that last group.
"He didn't overintellectualize about Christians 'jumping into the fray,' " — he just taught them how to organize and get action, said Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council.
Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum, said Weyrich traveled the country in 1980 teaching "pro-family neophytes" how to win elections. He turned the "pro-family movement into a fighting brigade," she said.
Weyrich was more than willing to take on people in his own party, especially those he considered accommodationist or defeatist. "Paul always liked the idea that he was conservative first" — not Republican, said Stuart Rothenberg, publisher of an independent political newsletter, who knew Weyrich for 20 years.
In 1989, Weyrich fought former Texas senator John Tower's nomination as Defense secretary on grounds of "moral character." He testified that he had seen Tower drunk and in the company of women not his wife.
The episode angered many Republicans and created a ferocious 19-year rift with Arizona Sen. John McCain, who was close to Tower. Weyrich first endorsed Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination this year, then Mike Huckabee.
When McCain won it, Weyrich said he'd vote for Libertarian candidate Bob Barr. He later told conservative magazine Human Events that he had grown "truly worried" about a victory by Democrat Barack Obama and would support McCain.
Weyrich didn't care about "going along and getting along to ingratiate himself," Rothenberg said, and was "remarkably analytical" about politics and policy.
Sometimes that led to departures from conservative orthodoxy. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Green said, Weyrich had concerns about government invasions of privacy — a position more in tune with liberals and civil libertarians.
He promoted light rail for decades — Feulner says Weyrich made him ride trolleys on joint fundraising trips as long as 35 years ago.
In a Free Congress column dated Thursday, Weyrich was in top form — aiming a mass-transit dig at a GOP White House. "It is the best of times because the 22nd city opens a light-rail system this December," he wrote. "It is the worst of times because the Bush administration has turned down 70 some cities which want light rail or streetcars."